The dialectic of life and thought: Georg Simmel's philosophy of history

Abstract

Guy Oakes has provided an important service for scholars in the Englishspeaking world by translating and introducing Georg Simmel’s works on the philosophy of history. Until the appearance of Oakes’s translations Simmel has been accessible to intellectual life in the English language primarily through his works on sociology. This partiality has, perhaps, distorted and blunted Simmel’s influence, especially in the United States. Where Simmel’s philosophical studies have been accessible to the intellectual community, as in the Hispanic world through the efforts of Jose Ortega y Gasset, they have had a fruitful and important impact. Indeed, the Orteguian school of ratiovitalism owes much directly to the Simmelian dialectic of life and form, in which cultural forms serve life by completing it, but violate life by containing its incessant novelty. Those who interpret Simmel as a formalist might reexamine their views in the light of his vitalistic philosophy, which bears greater resemblance to Henri Bergson’s intuitionism and William James’s radical empiricism than to the rigid conceptualism of the neo-Kantian schools. Oakes’s translations provide a good occasion for such a revaluation of Simmel’s contribution. In order to gain an adequate understanding of Simmel’s philosophy of history and of its significance it is necessary to read both The Problems of the Philosophy of History and Essays on Interpretation in Social Science, which should be considered as companion volumes. The Problems is a translation of the 1905 second edition of Simmel’s ‘epistemological essay’ critiquing the thesis of ‘historical realism’ that the aim of historical inquiry is to describe past events as they actually occurred. The 1905 work, which systematises an early effort of 1892, has the polemical intention of showing that realistic doctrines of historiography ignore the constitutive role of subjectivity in producing works of history. Simmel is inconclusive here, however, in presenting an alternative doctrine to realism, though he refers at the end of the work to a theory of ‘epistemological idealism’ that he has been defending. Except for the brief lecture, ‘On the History of Philosophy’, written in 1904, Essays